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Non-Aligned Movement: End the U.S. Blockade against Cuba

NAM (NOAL)

bankrate mortgage calculator p>(Prensa Latina) The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) reiterated on Friday in this city its call for the U.S. government to end its economic, trade and financial blockade of over 50 years against Cuba. The final declaration of the NAM Ministerial Conference terms the blockade unilateral and contrary to the UN Charter, international law,

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Interview with Noam Chomsky (+ Video)

Noam Chomsky

Frank Barat poses questions from artists, activists and journalists, on Egypt, corporate power, Palestine and more. For his second interview in less than a year with Professor Noam Chomsky (the first one took place in Cambridge in September 2010 and is available here), Frank Barat asked well known artists and journalists to each send one question that they’d like to ask Noam.

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What Osama’s Killing Means

Barack Obama

After the impromptu celebrations, the street parties and the hoots of joy at the U.S. Seal team’s killing of al Qaeda chief, Osama bin Laden, cooler heads may find the hootenannies to be premature. That’s because despite political and U.S. press claims to the contrary, the killing has done nothing to weaken al Qaeda. In fact, according to one counter-terrorism insider, al Qaeda is stronger today than it was 10 years ago, before the strikes of 9/11.

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Europe against the world

Strauss-Kahn was in the process of making drastic changes in the IMF to benefit the developing world when he was suddenly caught up in a sex scandal [GALLO/GETTY]

By Pepe Escobar (Al Jazeera) So the trial of the century won’t be Osama bin Laden’s after all. It will pit on one side “Ophelia”, a Western African Muslim immigrant to the US, a 32-year-old widow who supports herself and her teenage daughter working as a chambermaid in a five-star Manhattan hotel. On the other

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What Obama could not possibly say

Barack Obama

Facts on the ground will decide whether the United States really “values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator”. So let’s start with a fact. For US President Barack Obama, Saudi Arabia is not in the Middle East. Maybe the House of Saud has relocated the deserts and the oil to Oceania without telling anyone. In his major speech on Thursday from where the opening quote comes, and where, according to the Reuters gospel, he would “lay out a new US strategy toward a skeptical Arab world”, the skeptical Arabs, and the whole world for that matter, never heard these fateful two words, “Saudi” and “Arabia”. Even India, Indonesia and Brazil were mentioned.

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Lots of rhetoric – but very little help

Barack Obama

And then, I guessed it before he said it, he compared the Arab revolutions to the American revolution. We hold these truths to be self-evident, etc, etc. That many Arabs fought and died to be free of us than to be like Americans was quite lost on him. And then we had to hear what America’s “role” was going to be in the new Middle East. We did not hear if the Arabs wanted them to have a role. But that’s Obama for you. Always searching for a role.

Reflections by Fidel »

The Unsustainable Position of the Empire

The Unsustainable Position of the Empire

Nobody can assure us that in its agony, the empire won’t be dragging human beings down to catastrophe. As we know, while our species remains alive, everybody has the sacred duty to be optimistic. Ethically, any other behaviour wouldn’t be admissible. I remember well that one day, almost 20 years ago, I said that there

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Andrew Breitbart’s ‘electronic brownshirts’

Andrew Breitbart holds a news conference on Acorn Revealed: The Philadelphia Story at the National Press Club. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Judy Ancel, a Kansas City, Missouri, professor, and her St Louis colleague were teaching a labour history class together this spring semester. Little did they know, video recordings of the class were making their way into the thriving sub rosa world of rightwing attack video editing, twisting their words in a way that resulted in the loss of one of the professors’ jobs amid a wave of intimidation and death threats. Fortunately, reason and solid facts prevailed, and the videos ultimately were exposed for what they are: fraudulent, deceptive, sloppily edited hit pieces.

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Orlando Bosch And Bin Laden: A Tale Of Two Terrorists

Orlando Bosch / Osama Bin Laden

The recent deaths of two terrorists – one famous, one not so much – provides an illuminating examination of how America continues to conduct its controversial war on terror. Making headlines across the United States and called a defining moment in Barack Obama’s presidency, the dramatic raid into Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden is one side of the equation. The quiet passing of Orlando Bosch in Miami that elicited scant attention outside the confines of the South Florida community, is the other.

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No End to the “War on Terror,” No End to Guantánamo

The US Congress

With the death of Osama bin Laden, there is a perfect opportunity for the Obama administration to bring to an end the decade-long “War on Terror” by withdrawing from Afghanistan and closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The justification for both the invasion of Afghanistan (in October 2001) and the detention of prisoners in Guantánamo (which opened in January 2002) is the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on September 14, 2001, just three days after the 9/11 attacks..”